Interview with the Evanston Valley Enterprises Founders (part 3)

Q: When did you start investing in training on compost production?

Matt: That would have been 2016.  We'd been... for lack of a better term, farting around with it for a couple of years. We had some issues with the tree service, and in 2016, we actually sold all the equipment for the tree division. We sold the bucket truck, the chipper, the chip truck, we sold everything off. I retained my chainsaw and my climbing gear, and that was it. I didn't cut one tree that year because we decided to go all in on having one person making compost and topsoil.  

And so that's when the trainings began. Orlando, Florida with the United States Composting Council was the first training that I attended. It was a week-long event, and it was a general training on everything related to compost: static piles, windrows, in vessel composting, etc. It was just an overview showing you can make compost by these methods.  They also covered things like urban gardens. It was just a general training covering everything.  And I learned a lot there and shared what I learned with the group back home.

Then we found Midwest biosystems.  I was just researching different things.  We knew we were probably going to do windrows, so we're trying to figure out what's the best windrow turner. That's how we came across Midwest Biosystems.  And not just the equipment, but also the classes.  I said, hey, let's check that out.  So, they sent me to the training courses.  And I've been there three times now.  In 2016, we didn’t do a single bit of tree work. We also realized that when you first start out making compost, and nobody knows that you’re making it, nobody's going to buy it. So, sales were lacking enough that I had to figure some way to generate income.

So, we'd sent letters to all the old customers saying we had discontinued the tree service. In 2017, it was about the second week of January. I was sitting twiddling my thumbs going, "Okay, what am I going to do to generate some income?", and a guy called me and said, "Hey, can you cut some trees?"  He had not received a letter, and I guess he looked us up in the yellow pages because we still had an ad for the tree division .that we hadn't cancelled.  He called me up and I said, “Yep, I'll be right there.”  So, I dusted off my climbing gear and my chainsaws, and we went out and it was just a small job.  It took about two weeks and my phone started ringing again and then I just periodically climbed throughout 2017 doing small jobs. In 2018 is when we got our contract with Southern Indiana Power for right of way clearing. We didn't have any of the equipment, and SIP just told us to go buy it. They wanted somebody local, and that's ultimately what got us right back into trees. In 2018-19, I ran just the one crew. We hired several employees, and that's when we broke off, and we started the residential crew, and continued to operate a line clearance crew for the remaining part of the SIP contract.  After that, we dropped back down to one residential crew, but it seems like the volume of scrap material that we were producing was just as high as when we were running two crews.

So, we had a need to get rid of material, and we were trying to find anywhere else we could go, but we still had a mountain of chips.  What slowed in our need for getting rid of our waste in 2016-17, has more than tripled since we've started Evanston Valley Enterprises.